Denver needs to strike while the iron is hot, promoting its expanded convention center while the conference business is growing.

That’s part of the message tourism expert Peter Yesawich delivered Tuesday to local leaders at the Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau’s annual meeting.

While business travel in general has been flat for the past three years, travel for off-site business meetings and conferences is expected to grow by at least 6 percent this year, he said.

“Obviously, that’s where the opportunity is for Denver, given the new convention center. It catapults Denver into the national spotlight,” said Yesawich, chief executive of Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell, an Orlando, Fla.-based travel marketing firm. “I’d hit the accelerator hard on that.”

Leisure travel is growing nationally, he said, but Colorado will have to fight for its share.

In the annual survey by Yesawich’s firm of 1,650 U.S. travelers, 93 percent said they plan to take at least one leisure trip this year, up from 90 percent in 2000. But fewer of them say they are interested in visiting Denver in the next two years, dropping from 44 percent last year to 36 percent this year. Colorado’s mountain resorts dropped from 51 percent to 46 percent.

“It has more to do with the increased pressure from competing destinations, such as Las Vegas and San Diego,” Yesawich said. “They’re all competing for a share of the leisure-travel dollar.”

With three weeks left until Election Day, tourism officials pleaded with the more than 400 attendees at Tuesday’s breakfast to support Issue 1A. The ballot proposal would raise Denver’s hotel tax by 1 percentage point to boost the convention bureau’s marketing budget by $4 million a year.

“We’re the marketing arm of Denver, and we’ve been down $1 million a year for the last five years,” said president Richard Scharf. “We need the money to get the word out.”

In other business, the convention bureau said it has booked 405 convention and hotel meetings through 2016. They should bring 236,000 attendees and generate $382 million in spending.

A United Airlines pilot admits he stood naked in the window of his 10th-floor room at the Westin Hotel at Denver International Airport, but says he had no idea he was visible to anyone inside the main terminal -- and he's horrified to now face a criminal charge of indecent exposure.

A 27-year-old man has been arrested for investigation of first-degree murder after he allegedly demanded money from an elderly disabled man near a Denver homeless shelter and then beat and strangled the man to death.